The Game Master is a book about roleplaying games. It is intended for game masters from the aspiring novice trying to figure out how to launch their first campaign to the veteran who wants to discover how to consistently produce games that work and avoid train-wreck campaigns. It aims to foster a deeper appreciation of the unique nature of RPGs as both a dynamic literary form and a type of entertainment.

Tobiah Q. Panshin's The Game Master is an interesting book from front to back, one which is both wonderful and cringe-worthy at the same time. Of all things, perhaps its worst is its inconsistency; verging from academic-styled formal writing to wonderf [...]

The Game Master is a book that gives a great understanding of the dynamics of gaming groups. In easy terms, Tobiah describes how to assemble a group of friends into a cohesive party and lead them, with a willing and helpful Game Master, consistently, [...]

On the whole, this is a good book. It contains excellent advice on structuring the character creation process. Including putting requirements and limitations on the writing of character backgrounds. I have only one major point of contention, but it is [...]

There is a lot of good in this document, and I particularly applaud the succinct chapter XII (Too Long;Didn't Read) and recommend it to those who are starting out on the road to becoming a great GM. The preceding eleven chapters are also well-written, [...]

This book is good. Read it and prepare to have some knowledge dropped! I've been more GM than player in my time, and I found some good insights and helpful tips in here. It's one I'll refer to many times. Next time I'm ramping up for a campaign, [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.